Today I hiked the bluffs with the intention to spend some time in my hammock. It was a lovely morning, though a bit overcast for the season. A cool front arrived and, while expecting rain by mid-day, the morning was promising.
I brough Ellie, our Sheltie/Papillon mutt, along, fresh from her grooming yesterday. She seemed eager to get out. Her haircut is a bit shorter than usual and it does make her look younger. But, alas, she’s 12, losing her hearing and slower on the trail every time.
I found my hammock spot and decided on a pair of trees just a bit farther off the trail. My first spot has nearly perfect trees, but the trail splits around them so it feels as if you’re really in the middle of the trail because, well, you are. There is another pair of trees just off the west side of the trail. I thought I’d be there for awhile so decided it was a better location in the event others might enjoy the trail this morning.
I set the straps at or just above my height. My first try connecting the hammock was just a bit too high to get into. After lowering and recentering things, I found the middle, scooted my butt in and swung my legs up. That’s when I discovered these trees don’t cast the shade the others did. But it wasn’t hard to turn myself around to take advantage of the available shade.
I was trying to keep an eye on Ellie as I set up. She doesn’t go far but as her hearing is declining, I’m concerned she might not hear me. I called and clapped and spotted her a few dozen yards away. She came and I was able to reach out the uphill side of the hammock and scoop her up and in. She settled in and relaxed in a few minutes, with the occasional start to track some movement off in the brush.
As I started to relax I started to wonder what I was going to do. I found space in my lumbar pack to stuff in a book of poetry. But for the moment I thought of my meditation practice. I closed my eyes and began with the focus on my breathing, in, out. I’ve heard meditation is the focus of attention inward, on purpose, without judgement. I started there, recognizing the distractions as they came, dismissing them and returning to the breath. But I soon had a sense of other distractions. Not the usual random thoughts that creep in, but the sensations of the bluff around us.
I remembered an exercise we did in a college philosophy class, the idea similar to meditation but rather than inward focus and rejecting distractions, the intent was to take in the surroundings with each sense, individually.
What do you see? Well, nothing, since I decided to keep my eyes closed. That was easy.
What do you hear? The first sound was the wind. It surprised how many places I could hear it. First, in the needles of the branches above us, but also in the surround scrub oak. The wind was picking up and as I tried to tell if I could hear it higher up on the bluffs or whistleing through the nearby cellular network towers, I could hear the similar sound of distant traffic in the mix.
What do you feel? I focused on a favorite part of the hammock for me, the swing. I’m learning that with each setup, as the distance between the anchors changes, so does the rhythm of the hammock. With wider spacing between these trees than my deck setup, the hammock swung a bit slower, a little more relaxed. But there were other things. Ellie, in spite of her relative calm and willingness to join me, was hot. Her panting came at a rate much faster than the swing. And her rapid breathing added a slight bounce to the motion. As the cloud cover increased, we could feel the sunshine fade and the air cooling. The wind became gustier, enough that the anchor trees began to sway and add to the compound motions and frequencies of the hammock.
What do you taste? Not much, really, without anything actually in my mouth. But when you focus, it can be surprising to note the humidity, in the taste or lack of taste of the surrounding dirt and dust. Being a bit humid for here, there was less taste of dust than on the driest days.
What do you smell? Other than dog? In the high arid climate, about all I ever get a sense of is pine, but it is faint and fleeting. It is late enough that wildflowers, which are sparse here at best, are gone and I, for one, have trouble detecting any scent from them, even in their season.
There is something about the way my sense of the passage of time changes when I’m meditating. It isn’t as though time stops. But it recedes into the background somehow. I love it, but it's hard to describe. When I’m really focused, time seems irrelevant. I have noticed a striking consistency when I begin to recognize the world outside my focus. It feels nothing like waking up. I don’t fall asleep. I reach a state where I know I’ve been focused but feel myself emerging from it, leaving it behind. And it is so consistently 12 minutes that if I set a timer on my phone for 12 minutes, when I reach to stop it it is always within a few seconds of going off. As my awareness of all my senses returned, Ellie began to be a bit agitated and I lowered her back to the ground. I took in the scene and pulled the book from my pack. I love to let it open and read whatever poem it chooses to reveal. Not long after, the sense that I’d been there long enough began to creep in. With the first urge to check my phone, I sat up, swung my legs to the ground, slid out of the hammock and began to pack it all back into its stuff sack, the straps in their bag, and everything back into the small lumbar pack.
With Ellie waiting a bit up the trail, we completed our typical loop, down the trail to the sidewalk and around the block back to the house.
I brough Ellie, our Sheltie/Papillon mutt, along, fresh from her grooming yesterday. She seemed eager to get out. Her haircut is a bit shorter than usual and it does make her look younger. But, alas, she’s 12, losing her hearing and slower on the trail every time.
I found my hammock spot and decided on a pair of trees just a bit farther off the trail. My first spot has nearly perfect trees, but the trail splits around them so it feels as if you’re really in the middle of the trail because, well, you are. There is another pair of trees just off the west side of the trail. I thought I’d be there for awhile so decided it was a better location in the event others might enjoy the trail this morning.
I set the straps at or just above my height. My first try connecting the hammock was just a bit too high to get into. After lowering and recentering things, I found the middle, scooted my butt in and swung my legs up. That’s when I discovered these trees don’t cast the shade the others did. But it wasn’t hard to turn myself around to take advantage of the available shade.
I was trying to keep an eye on Ellie as I set up. She doesn’t go far but as her hearing is declining, I’m concerned she might not hear me. I called and clapped and spotted her a few dozen yards away. She came and I was able to reach out the uphill side of the hammock and scoop her up and in. She settled in and relaxed in a few minutes, with the occasional start to track some movement off in the brush.
As I started to relax I started to wonder what I was going to do. I found space in my lumbar pack to stuff in a book of poetry. But for the moment I thought of my meditation practice. I closed my eyes and began with the focus on my breathing, in, out. I’ve heard meditation is the focus of attention inward, on purpose, without judgement. I started there, recognizing the distractions as they came, dismissing them and returning to the breath. But I soon had a sense of other distractions. Not the usual random thoughts that creep in, but the sensations of the bluff around us.
I remembered an exercise we did in a college philosophy class, the idea similar to meditation but rather than inward focus and rejecting distractions, the intent was to take in the surroundings with each sense, individually.
What do you see? Well, nothing, since I decided to keep my eyes closed. That was easy.
What do you hear? The first sound was the wind. It surprised how many places I could hear it. First, in the needles of the branches above us, but also in the surround scrub oak. The wind was picking up and as I tried to tell if I could hear it higher up on the bluffs or whistleing through the nearby cellular network towers, I could hear the similar sound of distant traffic in the mix.
What do you feel? I focused on a favorite part of the hammock for me, the swing. I’m learning that with each setup, as the distance between the anchors changes, so does the rhythm of the hammock. With wider spacing between these trees than my deck setup, the hammock swung a bit slower, a little more relaxed. But there were other things. Ellie, in spite of her relative calm and willingness to join me, was hot. Her panting came at a rate much faster than the swing. And her rapid breathing added a slight bounce to the motion. As the cloud cover increased, we could feel the sunshine fade and the air cooling. The wind became gustier, enough that the anchor trees began to sway and add to the compound motions and frequencies of the hammock.
What do you taste? Not much, really, without anything actually in my mouth. But when you focus, it can be surprising to note the humidity, in the taste or lack of taste of the surrounding dirt and dust. Being a bit humid for here, there was less taste of dust than on the driest days.
What do you smell? Other than dog? In the high arid climate, about all I ever get a sense of is pine, but it is faint and fleeting. It is late enough that wildflowers, which are sparse here at best, are gone and I, for one, have trouble detecting any scent from them, even in their season.
There is something about the way my sense of the passage of time changes when I’m meditating. It isn’t as though time stops. But it recedes into the background somehow. I love it, but it's hard to describe. When I’m really focused, time seems irrelevant. I have noticed a striking consistency when I begin to recognize the world outside my focus. It feels nothing like waking up. I don’t fall asleep. I reach a state where I know I’ve been focused but feel myself emerging from it, leaving it behind. And it is so consistently 12 minutes that if I set a timer on my phone for 12 minutes, when I reach to stop it it is always within a few seconds of going off. As my awareness of all my senses returned, Ellie began to be a bit agitated and I lowered her back to the ground. I took in the scene and pulled the book from my pack. I love to let it open and read whatever poem it chooses to reveal. Not long after, the sense that I’d been there long enough began to creep in. With the first urge to check my phone, I sat up, swung my legs to the ground, slid out of the hammock and began to pack it all back into its stuff sack, the straps in their bag, and everything back into the small lumbar pack.
With Ellie waiting a bit up the trail, we completed our typical loop, down the trail to the sidewalk and around the block back to the house.
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